Barq's Root Beer

Edward Charles Edmond Barq bought the Biloxi Artesian Bottling Works on Keller Avenue in Biloxi in 1897 and invented Barq's root beer in 1898.

After experimenting with soda flavors using backyard tubs, Barq created the sharp tasting recipe that many enjoy today in the form of a Root Beer Float. Barq began bottling and selling his soft drink he named after himself in 1898.

Barq's was the iconic root beer of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the greater South and eventually was marketed in cities from New Jersey to Hawaii.

Although root beer was never as popular as the cola products, Barq’s nevertheless spread throughout the United States and branched out with flavors such as Grape, Moon-Glo, Imitation Strawberry, and red creme soda.

By day Barq and his wife sold the drinks, and then spent the rest of their time mixing the formula for them and refilling glass bottles. But first the bottles had to be sterilized and then each process had to be created in large pots in the couple's backyard. In 1936, Barq's operation was moved from Keller Avenue to a larger plant at 604 Lameuse Street, also in Biloxi. Demonstrating the product's appeal, by the 1950s, there were more than two hundred Barq plants across the United States.

Barq’s added Bubble Up, franchised through the Bubble Up Corporation of Peoria, Illinois, in 1955 and prepared for an even greater expansion.

In 1976, New Orleanians John Oudt and John Koerner bought Barq’s and moved the company’s headquarters to New Orleans. The company was sold to Coca-Cola in 1995 for $91 million.
Barq's Root Beer

History of beverage can

Tin is the oldest available metals and centuries of use have established its non-toxic nature.

The first beverage to be presented in canned form was beer. Bottles of beer were popular, but had their liabilities; they could break, they were heavy and they were offered early in the twentieth century on a return-for-deposit system, which generated additional costs.

Beer bottlers began to explore cans in the late 1920s, but faced a technical challenge: beer is highly reactive with metal, quickly undergoing chemical changes upon contact with it and acquiring a foul taste and smell.

In 1935, Krueger’s Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale became the first ever beverages sold in cans.

In the late 1950s, two major developments changed the design of beverage cans. Ermal Fraze of Dayton, Ohio, developed the first version of the pop-top cans. His idea was to attach a tab that could be used to open cans without a church key.

Other major development was Kaiser Aluminum Company developed an aluminium can.  In 1959 the Coors introduced the first all-aluminum beverage can and launched a recycling program, offering a penny for every returned can.

Historically, single steel sheets or continues steel strip were passed through a flux to remove the oxide barrier and thence into a bath of molten tin and the surplus tin was wiped off by pads on exit.

The first successful mass of produced can as a three –piece can in which the body was formed by rolling a tin -coated steel blank into a ribbed cylinder with an overlap side-seam sealed by a lead-tin soldered joint. The circular base was clinch-sealed to the cylinder and the top was also clinch-sealed to it, after filling the can.
History of beverage can

Tropicana Products

Tropicana Product is one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of fresh ready to drink orange juice.

The company’s primary products are pure and reconstituted orange and grapefruit juice, lemonade fruit punches and grape juice, most of which are distributed nationally.

Tropicana Pure Premium was founded in 1947 in Bradenton, Florida, by Anthony T. Rossi, with the goal of bringing Floridians the kind of orange juice found in Rossi’s home country of Italy. The line is so successful that in 1957 Rossi renames the company Tropicana Products, Inc.

Rossi began packaging and selling fresh fruit to department stores, hotels and restaurants through the United States. As the business grew, he moved to East Bradenton and supplying the ingredients for, among others things, the salads at New York’s fame Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Rossi produced frozen concentrated orange juice and in 1954 Tropicana engineers developed the process of flash pasteurization, which uses a lower temperature than regular pasteurization but heats the liquid for a longer period of time. This process preserves color and flavor, while still making the juice safe to drink.

By 1958 a convoy of refrigerated trucks transported goods nationally and the SS Tropicana was shipping 1.5 million gallons of juice to New York each week.

In 1978 Rossi retired and sold Tropicana to Beatrice Foods. Tropicana was purchased by Seagram’s in March 1988 for $1.2 billion, equal to about twenty times earnings.

Tropicana was acquired by PepsiCo in 1998. As part of its Tropicana brand, in 2010 PepsiCo introduced Tropolis, an 80-calorie fruit puree snack that comes in squeezable pouches.
Tropicana Products 

Beverages and Hospitality

Social activities require hospitality and beverages play important roles in cementing bonds of hospitality between individuals and nations.

Hospitality can be defined as the ‘friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests and strangers’.

Offering or accepting a drink is an indication of a social relationship, the acknowledgement of social obligation. Hospitality has its rules.

In Egypt, the host and hostess serve guests a range of beverages, sometimes specially brewed coffee and other times, juices from fresh fruits or sugar cane.

In Mongolia, the tradition is an offering of hot tea to visitor.

In Botswana, tea also has become a social drink that is offered to visitors in most households. Tea is consumed by adults and used to be drunk with fresh milk.

Beverages are also important on a larger diplomatic scale, where toasts of rice wine were the social highlights of President Nixon’s initial visits to the China and vodka toasts are central to diplomatic missions to Russia.

By offering the beverages and hospitality, customer looks for fulfillment of needs relating to self-esteem, status and security.

Historically many societies valued the social setting in which hospitality occurs, particularly the trait to act with generosity as host to visitors. This traditionally involved being charitable to strangers, giving drink was basic part of the social fabric.  
Beverages and Hospitality

History of Beverages in America

History of Beverages in America
The consumption of water is essential for human life. Throughout history, in rural areas water was easily accessible through river, wells and springs. In cities, water was usually provided by public pumps placed at intervals the streets.

Until the mid nineteenth century, the relationship between sanitation and drinking water was not understood and hence consuming water often caused illness.

One early solution was to combine water with alcohol. Although it was nor understood until almost the twentieth century, alcohol killed may of the germs present in the water.

In American colonial times, the most important American beverages were beer and hard cider made from apples. Where apples could not be grown, perry made from pears was a common alcoholic beverage.

The consumption of alcohol increased in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the price of rum declined. Wine did not become an important beverage in America until the late twentieth century.

There are many other beverages in America besides alcoholic ones. Tea was America’s most important hot beverage, but this slowly changed during the early nineteenth century as the price of coffee declined.

Hot and cold chocolate were minor beverage until massive commercial advertising promoted them during the 1930s.

Cows were important into the New World shortly after European colonization began, and milk was also consumed, particularly by children.

During the nineteenth century, milk was a proven disease-carrier and mother were urged to boil it before giving it to their children.

Milk did not become a safe beverage until beverage nineteenth century. Beginning in the early twentieth century milk producer launched major promotional campaign touting the healthful qualities of milk. As result, milk is now an important beverage for children and adults in America.
History of Beverages in America

History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe
Coffee consumption rapidly spread to the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and then to the rests of that country after taking hold of France.

Cafés were extremely successful in Italy during the 18th century. There were for example, 206 cafés in Venice (where the first coffee house in Europe is said to have opened in 1645), 40 in Padua, and many others in Rome, Florence, Turin and Naples.

At that time, the Italians were already drinking concentrated and very sweet coffee, “caffe ristretto”.

In Venice, the first big cafes at the end of the 17th century were the Florian and the Quadri in Saint-Mark’s Square.

Starting around 1700, Austria and the Scandinavia countries became big customers of coffee.

The first two Swedish coffeehouses were opened in Stockholm in 1690. In 1671, Fauste Nauron of Syria, a Maronite and professor of Oriental languages in Rome, wrote in Latin the first treatise in coffee.

Cultivation of coffee trees outside of the Middle East began only at the start of the 17th century.

Dutch merchants imported the first coffee plant into Holland from Mocha in 1616.

The coffee trees were cultivated in Ceylon in 1658 and in Java in 1696. The plants of Coffea Arabica imported from Arabia were destroyed by a flood but the cuttings imported in 1699 from Malabar into Java were the origin for all the coffee trees of the East Indies as well as those of the botanical gardens of Amsterdam; from there they were eventually exported to most of the botanical gardens of Europe.

A first but unsuccessfully planting took place in Dijon in 1670. In 1713, new attempts at transplanting coffee trees from Amsterdam to Paris were once again failures.

In 1714, the burgomaster of Amsterdam offered several coffee tree plants to King Louis XIV who entrusted them to Antoine de Jussieu, director of the botanical gardens.

These plants were the ancestor of coffee plants of the former French colonies and of part of Latin America.
History of Coffee: Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

The Origin of Milking

The Origin of Milking
For million of years, breast milk has been the first beverage. Replacement with animal milk carried tremendous implications and potential nutritional advantages.

The first irrefutable evidence for milking domesticated livestock and, by implication, human use of milk and the manufacture of dairy products, dates to approx 4000 BCE and is based on Stone Age rock art produced in the central Sahara region of Africa.

By 1500 BCE, milk use was widely distributed, and in India, many of milk’s qualities and already been described in the Charaka-Samhita.

“Cow milk has ten properties: sweet, cold, soft, fatty, viscous, smooth, slimy, heavy, dull and clear. Buffalo milk is heavier and colder than that from cow; useful to cure sleeplessness and excessive digestive power. Camel milk is rough, hot, slightly saline, light and prescribed for hardness in the bowels, works against worms... Milk from one-hooved animals (donkey; horse) is hot slightly, sour, saline, rough, light, promotes strength, stability, alleviates vata in extremities, Goat milk is astringent...”

Anthropologists, geographers and physicians have written on the physiologic and dietary implications of human using animal milk and use or nonuse o flavored particular societies.

With our ability to feed grass to livestock and the use of milk in its raw form or as fermented cheese, humans expanded into new areas of habitation and increased population density.

The majority of other human populations, following the standard mammalian pattern – lose the ability to maintain lactase production and therefore, cannot digest animal milks easily, a pattern evidenced by most Asians, West Africans, Southern European Mediterraneans and most Central and Southern American.

However, some human populations now maintain lactase production throughout their lives, a physiologic characteristic that links peoples and cultures as diverse as east African cattle pastoralist (the Masai, Suk, and Turkana) with northern European Scandinavians (e.g., Danes, Norwegian and Swedes).

Different cultures have widely diverging regarding the suitability of animal milks as human foods or beverages.

For some, it is question of identification: because animal milks are for the young of specific animal, it is wrong to mix these foods because the consumer may take on characteristics or the animal.
The Origin of Milking

History of Gin

History of Gin
Gin is basically a distilled grain spirit flavored with extract form different plants, mainly the juniper berry. The Dutch were the first to make gin and have been doing so since the late 1500s.

Gin was invented b Franciscus de la Boe, also known as Dr. Sylvius. Dr. Sylvius was a Professor of medicine and physician at Holland’s University of Leyden. He used a juniper berry elixir known as genievere – French for juniper.

Dr. Sylvius also had medicinal benefits in mind, but his concoction was so potable that is swept the country as liquor, under the name Geneva or Genever.

He thought that juniper berries could be assist in the treatment of kidney and bladder ailments.

British soldiers sampled his elixir when returning from the wars in the Netherlands and nicknamed it “Dutch courage.” When they brought the recipe back to England, they changed the name to gen and later to gin, which soon became the national drink of England.

At one time, London alone had more than 7,000 gin places.

Cheap gin was soon being made in London from almost anything – “Make it in the morning and drink it at night” – and sold in hole-the-wall dramshop all over London.

King of England, William of Orange at the time, was from Holland had his own gin consumption became somewhat legendary; the royal banquet hall was nicknamed The Gin Palace.

The pattern repeated itself in the United States during Prohibition, when so called bathtub gin was made at home, from alcohol, juniper and glycerin. Bathtub gin too, was a poor and sometimes lethal product, and the custom arose of mixing it with something else to kill the state, thus popularizing the cocktail.

It took gin some years to outlive its tacky, but today it is a highly respected favorite.
History of Gin

The First Cocktail

The First Cocktail
The true answer is lost to history, but many stories around. Most people agree that it’s an American invention.

The earliest printed use of the term that can be verified was found in the Hudson, New York newspaper, The Balance and Columbia Repository on May 6, 1806.

The editor received many questions about the new term, present in a concession speech from a losing political candidate, and here was his response:

“Cock tail, then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and butters – it is vulgarly called a bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold at the same time that it fuddles the head.”

Here are some of the more colorful stories surrounding the creation of this now ubiquitous beverage:

Rumor has it that early in American history, bartenders used to pour remnants of drinks and almost empty barrels into single container, selling swigs from this mixture to patrons at a reduced price. ‘Cock’ was another name for spigot and ‘tailing’ is the last bit of alcohol, so his drink was called ‘cock tailing,’ quickly shortened to ‘cocktail’.

A similar story recollects a bartender who poured his dregs into container shaped like a rooster (or cock) and the tap was set at the cock’s tail, hence cocktail.

Some believe that an apothecary in New Orleans served his guests a mix of brandy, sugar, water and bitters in an eggcup or ‘cocquetier’ in French, which was quickly shortened to ‘cocktay’ and then ‘cocktail.’

Alcohol was often used as a medical treatment, rumored to be applied from the tip of a feather from a cock’s tail; then, when people started to drink or gargle the medicine outright, the name ‘cock’s tail’ was still used.

Betsy Ranagan ran an inn in Yorktown that was frequented by American and French soldiers after the American Revolutionary War. To impress her patrons one evening, she stole chickens from her neighbors and served mixed drinks with the chicken feathers sticking out as garnishes. As her guests became drunken and rowdy, they continue to call for more ‘cock tails’.
The First Cocktail

History of Scotch Whisky

History of Scotch Whisky
Scotch is short for Scottish whisky – although Americans are just about the only people who use the shorted term for whisky made in Scotland. There are a number of categories of Scottish or Scotch whisky:

• Single malt Scotch Whisky
• Single Grain Scotch Whisky
• Blended Scotch Whisky
• Blended Malt Scotch Whisky
• Blended Grain Scotch Whisky

Malt whisky was born well before the fifteenth century, which is the first time Scottish records mention it. An old Scottish says that it was created to reward the Scots for having to endure the cold, wet climate of their homeland.

The earliest evidence of Scottish whiskey is from 1494 – 1495, when Scottish Exchequer Roll included an entry of malt delivered to Friar John Car to make aqua vitae. In 1497, a barber brought a gift of whiskey to King James IV at Dundee. In 1505, the Guild of Surgeon Barbers in Edinburgh was given the monopoly of distilling and selling aqua vitae within the city boundaries. Generally, whisky was used for medicinal purposes. By 1550, however, increasing prosecutions for infringements of the barbers’ privilege suggest that whisky was becoming more popular generally as a beverage.

The 1600s and 1700s were marked by continuous disagreements between distillers and the government over taxation of spirits, and laws were enacted with the intents of putting the smaller home producers out of business. This only ensured a lively smuggling market for their product. Finally in 1823 Scotland’s Parliament enacted more lenient laws.

About 130 years ago a Scotsman named Andrew Usher is credited with being the first to blend malt whisky and grain whisky to reduce its pungency. The grain whiskies are made chiefly from corn (or corn and wheat) and are distilled in column stills at around 180 proof, which is somewhat below neutral spirits but very light in flavor. Malt and grain whiskies are aged separately for several years and then blended, with as many as 30 or 40 (or more) different malt and grain whiskies in a given brand.

Scotch becomes popular in the United States during the Prohibition years, when it was smuggled into the country from Canada, the Caribbean and ships at sea. The earliest brands were dark, peaty, and strong. After the repeal of Prohibition, Scotland’s distillers began tailoring their products to the lighter American palate. Scotch got under another boosts in popularity when American soldiers return from the World War having acquired a taste for it. A light bodied Scotch is not necessarily light colored since all Scotches have caramel added to ensure color uniformity, nor does light body mean low alcohol content. All scotches are bottled at a minimum of 80 proof; most are 86 proof.
History of Scotch Whisky

History of Instant Coffee (Nescafe)

History of Instant Coffee (Nescafe)
The beginnings of Nescafe can be traced all the way back to 1930, when the Brazilian government, first approached Nestlé. The agency, Brazilian Coffee Institute seeks Nestle to preserve the huge coffee surpluses, by develop coffee that was soluble in hot water.

Coffee guru, Max Morgenthaler, and his team set out immediately to find a way of producing a quality cup of coffee that could be made simply by adding water, yet would retain the coffee’s natural flavor.

After seven long years of research in Nestle Swiss laboratories, they found the answer. The new product was named Nescafé – a combination of Nestlé and café. Nestle introduced Nescafe, the first commercially successful soluble coffee, in Switzerland, on April 1st, 1938. The company applied the technology at its Hayes factory, west London.

Instant coffee processing was not a new idea; it was invented by a Japanese chemist in 1901 and had been marketed and sold by other companies without success. Nestle revolutionized the way instant coffee was made. Nestle developed a new process for dehydrating the concentrated coffee which vastly improved the quality. In entailed spraying a fine mist of the solution into a heated tower where the droplets turned to powder almost instantly.

For the first half of the next decade, however, World War II hindered its success in Europe. Nescafe was soon exported to France, Great Britain and the USA. Its popularity grew rapidly through the rest of the decade. It was so popular that the entire production of its US plant was reserved for military use.

By the 1950s, coffee had become the beverage of choice for teenagers, who were flocking to coffeehouses to hear the new rock ’n’ roll music.

Over the years the company has kept the emphasis on innovation, introducing pure soluble coffee (1952) solely using roast coffee beans, freeze dried soluble coffee (1965) and coffee granules (1967). In 1994 Nestle invented the full aroma process, which improved the quality of instant coffee. Such innovations have made sure that Nescafe has remained the world’s leading coffee. It is also the third most valuable brand in the entire drinks sector, after Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
History of Instant Coffee (Nescafe)

History of Minute Maid

Minute Maid is a product line of beverage, associated with lemonade or orange juice. The company is owned by The Coca-Cola Company.

It was started during World War II, where National Research Corporation of Boston, Massachusetts, developed high vacuum evaporation processes for dehydrating penicillin, blood plasma and streptomycin for use in United States war effort. The army wanted to extend and apply this method for food industry.

In 1945 National Research Corporation organized Florida Foods Corporation to build a production plant in Plymouth Florida. The plan was to fulfill contract with army. Since the war was over, the company diverted its focus to consumer market. They explored the possibility of marketing an “intermediate step” in the production process – frozen orange juice concentrate. And it was success. Then the name of Minute Maid was established. The name of Minute Maid was an idea of Boston advertising agency.

A few years later Florida Foods Corporations was renamed as The Minute Maid Company.

In 1960, The Coca-Cola Company acquired Minute Maid through a stock swap. The Coca-Cola Company then introduced ready to drinks chilled juice in 1973 and in 1996 ‘Minute Maid Premium, 100% Pure Squeezed Juice.
History of Minute Maid

History of Apple Cider

History of Apple Cider
There are two types of apple cider; sweet cider and hard cider. Sweet cider is simply the unfiltered juice of pressed apples. Hard cider is the fermented, unfiltered juice of pressed apples. There was a long history of apple cider.

During ancient times, Hebrews drank and called the drink “Shekar” and the Greeks drink “Sikera”. Both obtained by cooking apples with fermented juice. Before the Christian era, the various peoples of Europe had succeeded in producing beverage more or less similar to cider from a variety of fruit.

When the Romans arrived in England in 55 BC, they were reported to have found the local villagers drinking a delicious cider-like beverage made from apples.

By beginning of the ninth century, cider drinking was well established in Europe and a reference made by Charlemagne clearly confirms its popularity.

After the Norman conquest on 1066, cider consumption became widespread in England and orchards were established specifically to produce cider apples. In the 15th century, real progress was made in its presentation. Cider is a way of life.

In 1588, Julien LE PAULMIER, a Norman, publishes a treatise called “De Vino et pomaco”. It contributed to make cider better known and give it the place it deserves as a healthy drink, and praised its medicinal properties. The consumption of cider grew and grew but was then halted several times by permanent state of war.

During colonial era, hard apple cider was by far the most popular alcoholic beverage in America far more than whiskey, wine or beer. Hard cider became the traditional drink of New England not long after the first settlers arrived.

Apple cider continued in its popularity into the 1800s due in part to the efforts of the legendary Johnny Appleseed who planted many apple trees in the Midwest. As a result, apple cider brewing spread into that area of the country.
History of Apple Cider

Mountain dew history

Mountain dew history
Mountain Dew is a caffeinated, sweet, citrus-flavored soft drink produced by PepsiCo, Inc. The formula invented back in the 1940s in Marion, Virginia and first marketed in Johnson City and Knoxville, Tennessee the south-eastern state of Tennessee, USA in 1948.

The name Mountain Dew was first trademarked by two brothers, Barney and Ally Hartman, who ran a bottling plant in Knoxville, Tennessee. Originally used as a mixer with whisky, it was a far cry from what it has become today, though people still mix it with various alcoholic beverages.

The perfect Mountain Dew taste many know and love today is credited to Bill Bridgforth, who joined the company in 1958. The original bottle was made to look as though it was a bootlegged beverage like those made in mountain stills and was decorated with hillbillies and outhouses, and pseudo-facts like 'Filled by Ed and Gene'.

It wasn't until after PepsiCo, Inc. bought Mountain Dew in 1964 that its appeal became nationwide. It has been introduced globally at various stages, but the USA remains its stronghold. The days of outhouses and hillbillies are past: the target audience is now different. Current Mountain Dew's commercials appeal to fun-seeking, wild, outdoorsy teenagers making Mountain Dew one of the popular soft drinks in America.
Mountain dew history